Use Gamification to Overcome Subscription Fatigue

Many membership sites face subscription fatigue in an oversaturated market. That’s why keeping members engaged with your site regularly is essential. Engagement helps avoid member churn, build your brand, and maximize your revenue. 

One of the best ways to build engagement is through gamification.

Gamification means to incorporate game-like elements such as points, leaderboards, rewards, and badges into non-game content. Since the early 2000s, this trend has exploded, becoming a dominant engagement strategy used by some of the biggest brands around. 

Let’s explore how gamification can keep members active and discuss easy solutions to implement gamified strategies on your member site. 

The value of gamification

When it comes to memberships, churn can be the biggest problem. Frankly, it’s getting harder to convince folks to sign up and keep paying for another membership site. Memberships and subscriptions are not the novelty they once were. 

However, studies show that gamification helps improve intrinsic motivation, in which lies its true value. Increasing motivation is the secret to keeping users on your site. By engaging members in choices and challenges, you’ll unlock that desire in members to complete tasks to feel a sense of accomplishment. 

In addition, gamification can ignite the competitive human spirit. The idea of winning or being the “best” can motivate folks to participate regularly and stick around for results. As such, feeling driven by a sense of competition can improve how customers think about their membership value. 

Common gamification elements for members

Here are some common elements of gamification you can use to keep members active:  

Points tracking

Whether it’s actually “points” or some other trackable unit, a points tally helps motivate members to keep going, finish a specific section of content, or otherwise keep coming back to your site. You can award points to members for completing purchases, reading or engaging with content, or filling out profile elements. You can extend points further by allowing members to “redeem” points in specific ways (such as a discount coupon or special offer). 

A credit system

Similar to points, a credit system can essentially be thought of as the member’s site-based “bank account.” Credits can be awarded through the completion of milestones and achievements and used to access things like exclusive bonus content, special privileges, and discounts. You can even allow a credit system to work towards a portion of a member’s monthly dues. 

Progress bars

Seeing a percentage of progress helps members visualize where they’re going and how far they’ve come. Progress bars are especially useful when it comes to courses or other types of content presented in a specific order. 

For example, gamifying your onboarding experience is an easy way to incorporate a progress bar. Each activity or step in the onboarding process can fill in a portion of that bar, and users will be itching to see that bar filled in 100%. 

Progress bar with a prompt to resume the course (Codeacademy)

Badges, awards, and titles

These can be awarded when members complete certain activities around your site. You might even give your members a dashboard where they can view all of their achievements at once. This will give them a sense of accomplishment – and a way to celebrate their progress!  

Consider rewarding your members when they:

• Reach a certain number of points
• Complete a course or series of courses
• Read X number of articles
• Reach a certain number of downloads
• Purchase a certain dollar amount or number of products
• Receive a certain number of likes, comments, or kudos for helping others
• Finish their member profile (image, personal information, etc.)
• Publish a certain number of posts or amount of content
• Remain a member for a certain amount of time
• Refer a certain number of new members
• Upgrade to a higher membership tier

Making badges and awards easily shareable via social media channels also adds an extra social element to the mix! Not only is this enjoyable for your members but it also catches the attention of prospective members within their networks.

Badges dashboard (Khan Academy)

Pathways

Depending on the type of content that’s on your site, you might decide to give your members different pre-designed content pathways. This takes some of the decision-making burden off your members. Plus, if they already trust you enough to sign up for your membership site, they’re likely to appreciate and take advantage of your efforts to simplify the process for them. 

Some examples of specific pathways might be:

• A beginner’s crash course
• A themed collection of creative assets or downloadables
• A 30-day video boot camp
• A linked set of blog posts or an “academy” of learning
• A plan to fully integrate with your site, from signup to community postings

Path options with content to be unlocked (Duolingo)

Leaderboards/rankings

This is simply one of the best ways to bring out the competitive side of gamification. Providing a leaderboard with achievement rankings helps motivate members as they compete against each other for high scores. Leaderboards and rankings typically pair well with other gamification features on your site, such as points and badges–use one gamification feature to promote interaction with another! 

Leaderboards used in a fundraising campaign (GiveWP)

Unlocking content

Reserving some of your content for members who reach certain achievements or milestones can do wonders when it comes to keeping them active on your site. Unlocking content works in tandem with badges, awards, and credit systems, as well as leaderboards. 

Top members can get access to exclusive features that can be teased to those who haven’t completed the activity yet. Think of unlocking discount codes and coupons as well to incentivize members to reach the unlock level. 

Build memberships with Restrict Content Pro  

Depending on your content and goals, implementing gamification can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. However, just adding one or two game elements to your membership site can quickly add a new level of interest.

While extremely effective, gamification is best used to supplement your efforts. It’s not a replacement for understanding and personally engaging with your members. Gamifying memberships can bring serious benefits in the engagement department, but always keep your core focus on the value (and the real-world benefits) that you provide.

Ready to see how you can gamify a membership? Check out the best gamification plugins to use for WordPress, then try out a demo of Restrict Content Pro to see how this strategy can help your membership site grow.